House of Games
Story by Simon Kirrane
| Games consoles are all very well, but they don't dominate the room like a coin-op. You can't play them standing up like an arcade and you can't give 'em a kick when you get it horribly wrong. For some people there just ain't no substitute for a real coin-op in the house, and their numbers are growing... Here's the ideal: every house comes with its own fully-equipped games room, its den. There's your full-sized snooker table - that's the room's centre piece. There's table football, and air hockey. On the wall there's a dart board (with proper floor markers, natch), and a basketball hoop. And next to them all, in a neat little row, there's a bunch of classic arcade machines. It's a fantasyland, right? The problem is that most of us live in houses or flats with no room for table football, let alone a snooker table. But coin-ops are a different story. If you're got room for a nice big stereo or a drinks cabinet, you've got room for a coin-op. Of course, persuading your other half that slapping a Pac Man machine where they think a sideboard or writing bureau should be could prove easier said than done. But in theory, it's a breeze. So, lets meet the men who've lived the theory. Over the next few pages Andrew Baker, Chris Jackson and Simon Wilson - three enthusiasts who've let coin-ops take over their lives - talk about how they got the arcade machine bug, and give us their personal recommendations. Plus, we have their expert advice on what to buy and how much to pay; and they'll tell you what to check when purcashing your own machine. A word of advice from all of them - coin-op collecting is habit forming. You could soon find it develops into an addiction... First off, the good news. Though the coolest thing you can own (this side of a spanking new SpikeOut machine or something) is probably £1500 of original Taito Space Invaders cabinet, collecting coin-ops doesn't have to be a hobby for rich men only. On the contrary, you can get rather less sought after machines - something like Vulcan Adventure say - for a bargain basement £150. And, for a bit more money, you can get an alternative printed circuit board (PCB) or two to swap with Vulcan Adventure when you get bored of it. Sounds cheap, doesn't it? Sounds like everyone should be doing it, right? But they're not, and there are a few obvious reasons why. First and foremost is that knowing where to get hold of your coin-op ain't always that easy. yes, there are warehouses up and down the country full-to bursting with dedicated cabinets from the late 70's and the early 80's, but generally the people who run them can't be bothered dealing with the unwashed mass of the British Public. And why should they mess around selling to the private punter, when they can flog a £30,000 state-of-the-art coin-op one week and a batch of 40 £800 games the next? Because of this almost complete disinterest from the coin-op establishment, a number of enthusiasts have set themselves up as dealers and part-time dealers to service punters like you and me. It's down to guys like this that so many classic arcade machines are still in service and available - and when you see the machine that stole your childhood in one of the garages at a knock-down price... Well, you'd need to be a better man than us to resist. What Exactly are you Buying? When you buy an old arcade machine from a classic coin-op dealer, chances are that what you'll be getting is a JAMMA cabinet. This is your basic Japanese Arcade Machine Manufacturers Association unit, and was an industry godsend when if first appeared in the mid to late `80s. Why? Well, imagine you'd get your hands on a fully dedicated Pac-Man cabinet, and a year later you'd cart it away, an obsolete wreck, to make way for the new Ms Pac-Man or whatever. Not so with JAMMA. Now you could keep the old cabinet exactly where it was by replacing the stickers on the side and fitting a new printed circuit board (or PCB - the actual game itself), it looked like you'd got a brand new one. Suddenly it was just like slotting a giant Nintendo cartridge into a giant Nintendo 64. And what worked for `80s arcades can work for you too. Because coin-op machine cabinets weigh in at eight stones or more (they have big weights at the bottom to stop them toppling over), and there's limited space available in your dining room (you'll need six feet of headroom, plus floorspace of two feet by two feet, plus standing room), the less you have to move one of the buggers about, the better. JAMMA means you probably won't have to. Get your £150 coin-op, put it where you want it, and when you get bored of it, splash out anything from £20 to £200 or so to replace the inner workings. All you need do is turn the machine off and exchange the PCB's - it's the ultimate home console Of course, there are other machine standards. There is also Nintendo's old multigame cabinet - little more than a NES with the ability to rotate 30 games - and the Neo Geo cabinet, which worked in a similar way to the JAMMA. With these, though, you slotted in an actual cartridge instead of a PCB when the game needed changing. Both systems have their advocates, but for most of us JAMMA is the thing. Or you may come across one of the old dedicated cabinets instead. In the early days of Tempest, Pac-Man and Star Wars (with its vector graphics and one-off screen), the dedicated cabinets were kind. Though JAMMA effectively rendered many of them obsolete, these remain the games for the purist, and because of that prices for the most popular machines have risen accordingly; in November [1998] a dedicated Defender sold in the US for £1,000, and was considered a bargain. Still, you never know - it's always possible that that bloke you met with a lockup in Neasden has 30 of them hanging around... Before you start to splash the cash, though, do as much Internet-based research as possible - and though there are a few UK-based coin-op pages, this means checking out the States. Ever wondered which is the best path to take in Pac-Man to get maximum points, which of the giant coin-op auctions that are cropping up is best to go to, or why the Star Wars vector screens are so difficult to come by? Look to America to tell you. What it won't tell you, however - nor with any conviction - is what to pay. There are no real cost standards for these things, so you might pick up a rare, sit-down R-Type cabinet (in industry parlance, sit-downs are known as "cocktail" cabinets) from a dealer for £1,500, then see the exact same machine for two days later in Exchange and Mart. After-sales service is touhc and go too - you might buy your game, get it home, switch it on and nothing happens, then find your dealer doesn't want to know. We could be talking about a 20-year old game, after all, and they're unlikely to come with a warranty. Here in the UK we're still a long way behind the US in terms of private coin-op ownership, but general opinion has it that 1998 saw a marked increase in the number of people interested in buying their own. As more people get involved, it can only mean more dealers - and that means more back-up if anything goes wrong. Right now, while prices are quite low and the supply reasonably plentiful, is an ideal time to get involved. Go on, take the plunge...
 The information and contents of this site are copyright Robert Hazelby E-mail: robert@spamnomorejabba.demon.co.uk (remove `spamnomore` from above address to email me) |